Transcript:
The Purpose of Your Bedroom
So when you’re ready to go to sleep, what you surround yourself with is critical in helping you fall asleep and maintaining sleep all night long. First off, let’s remember that the bedroom is for two things only. It’s sleep and intimacy. You should not be working in bed. You should not be reading in bed. You shouldn’t be watching television in your bedroom. All of that should be done in a separate room. You should associate your bedroom with sleeping and intimacy only.
1. Choose a Good Mattress and Pillow
So let’s look at the sleep equipment. What we’re going to surround ourselves with when it is time to fall asleep. And probably one of the natural things to look at is a mattress and pillow. We have to understand that one size does not fit all when it comes to mattresses and pillows. It’s probably just like a good pair of pants or a good shirt, maybe a good pair of shoes. We know that one size doesn’t fit all. Our bed partner probably doesn’t look physically like us all the time, right? So we want to make sure that whatever we choose from a mattress and pillow, it fits us. One size doesn’t fit all. The other thing we want to make sure and look at is the light in our bedroom.
2. Make Your Bedroom Completely Dark
One of the things we have to do is we have to have complete darkness when it’s time to fall asleep. We need to make sure that light from inside the bedroom or outside of the bedroom doesn’t hit our eyelids. Even small led lights should be covered over so we don’t see them. If you can’t put up blackout curtains, if you can’t take care of all the light in your bedroom, an eye mask is the perfect thing for you to do. We have to have darkness in order to secrete melatonin, and melatonin is important for us to fall asleep and maintain sleep.
3. Keep Your Bedroom Cool
The next thing is temperature. Temperature is critical for sleep. Temperature actually impacts sleep more than noise does in our environment. We have to have a decrease in our core body temperature in order to fall asleep and maintain sleep. If you’ve ever had a fever from being sick, we know that when we have a fever, we can’t decrease our core body temperature at night, so we have very fragmented sleep around that. So we need to have a very cool bedroom. Actually, the colder, the better. Get thermal neutral. Get as many sheets and blankets as you like, but we need to make sure the ambient room temperature is around 65, 68 degrees. The closer you can get that to 65, the better that you’ll sleep.
4. Block Out Internal and External Noise
And the last thing is around noise. We want to make sure that we can eliminate all noise in our environment, and that may be a bed partner who is snoring. Let’s not throw them out. Let’s solve their snoring issues, but let’s solve that noise issue. Maybe it’s outside noise that you can’t control. Maybe it’s internal noise that you can’t control. Maybe because of a grandfather clock or maybe it’s just people in the other room that are keeping you awake. One of the things that you can do is just white noise in your bedroom. I don’t like using white noise from an app necessarily. I like just a standalone white noise machine. This is going to allow you to filter out the noise outside of the environment. If you don’t have a white noise machine and it really doesn’t work very well for you, one of the things you can do is just earplugs. If you can tolerate having earplugs in all night, it’s a great way to fall asleep and maintain sleep all night long.
So, make sure you have the right mattress and pillow. Make sure you block out all light. We need to make sure our room temperature is around 65, 68 degrees, and make sure we can block out all noise. That’s a great way to fall asleep and maintain sleep every night.
